Forward the metadata when re-exporting a field about nickel HOT 1 OPEN

This is bound to be somewhat heuristic and fragile

I agree. Also, there are some cases when the semantics of propagating metadata is really not what you want. This question of propagation has been extensively scrutinized in RFC005, see for example this section. For balance, propagation is acknowledged as desirable though in some situations here, so it was a known tradeoff when siding for static metadata that can only appear at field location.

For those reasons, I think the inherit solution is very appealing. No complex heuristics. What's more, inherit is overdue and the recursivity by default is a strong incentive to implement it, so it's a desirable and planned extension which has a good chance of landing in some future version.

There might be cases where you want to inherit without metadata, so let's think hard about it, but for now, I don't see any example.

from nickel.